Google Makes Big Announcements at I/O 2018

The Google I/O developer conference is an annual festival for developers where Google focuses on developing and exploring the next generation of technology. The ongoing I/O developer at Mountain View, California has been the stage to some of the biggest announcements from the tech giant.

Just beginning of its keynote, Google made a statement that it is rebranding its research division to Google AI suggesting that it is going all in on artificial intelligence. The announcement further sheds light on how Google focuses on Research and Development on computer vision, neural networks and natural language processing.

Part of its announcements included a continued conversation update to its home assistant making it clear that home assistant users do not have to say OK Google or Hey Google every time they say a command but instead have to do it just the first time.

Next is about Google Photos getting the boost of AI. While the service already makes it easy to correct photos with the help of its in-built tools and AI powered features, users can do more like colouring B&W photos, correcting the brightness and rotations.

Google also announced that it is all set to launch smart displays as early as this July and that the feature will be powered by YouTube and Google Assistant. This will give the users an option to have a visual display where they can perform an action which cannot be resolved by just a voice interface.

Google declared that its Assistant will soon be coming to Google Maps and will be available for both Android and iOS users. So, rather than just getting the directions, users will be able to identify buildings and other things and can even identify dog breeds by pointing their cameras at them.

The next in the line of announcements is its next-generation TPU machine-learning hardware, which, according to Sundar Pichai, is 8 times more powerful than its predecessor. With this Google wants to bring all the developers into its ecosystem and gain advantage over its competitors.

Google News getting the power of AI redesign was the next big announcement which, unlike Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, will help the users to keep with news they mostly care about from trusted publishers. With Facebook exploiting legitimate information of more than 86 million users, Google could easily attract more users to its platform.

The new software development kit that Google calls ML Kit was also announced at the conference which allows Android and iOS developers to integrate pre-built machine learning models into their apps.